Brown and Periodization

In “Periods and Resistances,” Marshall Brown considers periodization as a dialectic method for category and examination of literature – both as “a challenge and an opportunity, a resource and a corrective” (316). According to Brown, even though disadvantages of periodization, such as characterizing history with certain labels, bring about discomfort to people, periodization is indeed an indispensible instrument for people to write the history of literature. Brown further suggests that people should not only focus on disadvantages of periodization, but also pay attention to how to use periodization. Especially, I am interested in one of Brown’s statements about periodization:

All designations point beyond themselves. All periods have limits. A period is always a period of something, never a period of everything…The totality of conceptual purity has nothing to do with universality. Much vexation could be avoided if we recognized that every period is also a terrain, in more or less proximate relationship to other terrains. (314)

Recognizing the partiality of periodization, Brown takes a step further to reveal that this partiality, to a large extent, is caused by people’s delimitation. Hence, Brown advocates a new kind of “periodization” that is not merely a division of time, but knowledge of a certain field or of a certain discipline that related to others. This statement evokes me to rethink the writing of history of literature. Before I read Brown’s article, I thought that the biggest problem of periodization is its over-emphasis of the trend of literature activities and movement, as well as its de-emphasis of the individual’s impulse and the close reading of a specific literary text. However, if considering the periodization as certain “terrain”, as Brown calls, of the whole literary scholarship, which is specifically focus on the social, cultural and political contexts and background of literature activities, then periodization would not be recognized as an obstacle, but as a useful tool for the development of other related literature research “terrains”, such as interpretation of a writer’s certain work, just as Brown says: “uneven developments do not invalidate periods but help define or even motivate them” (315).

Question: In the end of his article, Brown defines thoughts as “the other of knowledge”, differentiating it from knowledge (316). How can we understand “the other of knowledge”? What’s difference between “thoughts” and “knowledge”, in terms of the concerns of the periodization? Here, does “knowledge” mean a certain field of knowledge, and does “thoughts” mean all fields of knowledge?